I feel like I need to send my kids to school with a list of things they cannot say, even in jest.

Tell me about it. A lot of the time, I suspect that Nate's "attitude" in school comes from the combination of a) snarky parents b) a well-developed sense of the absurd and c) the fact that we encourage questioning and debate in our house, even though ultimately, he knows it's a (mostly) benevolent dictatorship.

Grah. One of my wisdom teeth is coming in and poking my gum and irritating me and making it annoying to chew things. My dentist told me to get all four removed a year ago, but I never got around to finding an oral surgeon. And now I need one ASAP! GET THIS EXTRA TOOTH OUT OF MY MOUTH.

Oooh, I had that happen, P-C! It made me feel a lot of sympathy for teething babies. That shit hurts!!

It's not absurdly painful yet, but I want to get it taken care of before it gets to that point. Every now and then, I've had a few days of soreness in one of the quadrants, but it usually went away. But I don't think I ever felt an actual part of a tooth before, or if I did, it wasn't that significant.

I lived for about five years with my upper two wisdom teeth fully descended and the lower two impacted. One of them was at an angle and one corner finally started poking out of the gum. That's when I had the surgery-- had Demerol for the first time and went to Tempe three days later for the Fiesta Bowl with strict instructions not to exert too much pressure when playing my trumpet for fear of blowing out my stitches.

Good times.

Teacher: ....Er...I think you're going to have the last laugh on that one, mate

OK, I think this just made my day (though Dylan's sneeze response was a close second)

Had all four wisdom teeth removed the first Monday of the year when I was a junior in high school--the bottom two were just breaking the surface of the gums and got stuck and the other two never appeared at all.

My sister was on Xmas break from college and had hers done at the same time, but she was able to recover at home for the rest of the week. I had to go back to school the next day only with the morning dosage of pain meds--Mom told me to suck it up and use aspirin, which I managed to forget at home.

When the morning dosage wore off around noon, I was in agony and begging people at school for some aspirin. Finally, a teacher took pity on me and, after swearing me to secrecy, gave me a few Bayer tablets. I think she saved my sanity that day.

P-C, I had that. It got worse and worse as they broke through the gums slowly. Ouch ouch ouch.

Removal and recovery (even with borderline dry socket -- hint: DO NOT OVERFLUSH YOUR MOUTH, ORAL SCABS ARE WHITE, THAT IS NOT TRAPPED FOOD) was superior to the teething pain.

...random work rant deleted...

Hi everybody! Lovely day we're having.

P-C, the fuss and bother of oral surgery is far less than the fuss and bother of an abscessed wisdom tooth plus the fuss and bother of oral surgery.

Sure, because the best solution to fixing the problems with our public school system is for all the parents with other options to pull their kids out of it.

Speaking of knee-jerk reactions, having violent ones to poor judgment on the part of school administrators runs in my family. My dad once dealt with a school's lack of preventing bullying by slamming a baseball bat into the counter of the front office at my sister's school.

Home-schooling is legal; bashing in the head of a school administrator for acting like a Barney Fife in a low-budget women-behind-bars flick probably isn't. I'm just trying to stay out of jail, here.